People

Alex Kentsis

Read his academic papers on PubMed, Google Scholar, and arXiv, dissertation on ProQuest, and popular writings on Vector. In his free time, he likes to carry out elaborate experiments in the kitchen, with his kids serving as cooking research participants; some recipes on Vox Over.

Casie Reed

is our lab manager.

Casie received her BA in Human Ecology from the College of the Atlantic and studied at North Carolina State University for her MS in Plant Biology. Prior to graduate school, she studied with Alex in Tom Look’s lab at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Casie is currently studying the role of DNA transposition in solid tumors.

Fiona Brown

is a research fellow.

Fiona is a research fellow from Australia. She studied hematology and molecular biology before completing her PhD at the University of Melbourne under the mentorship of Prof. Stephen Jane and Prof. David Curtis. Her current research interests are to understand the molecular determinants of therapy resistance in acute myeloid leukemia, and to develop improved therapeutic strategies to maximize the efficacy of conventional chemotherapy.

Kavitha Ramaswamy

is a clinical fellow.

Kavitha is a pediatric hematologist/oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering with a special interest in pediatric leukemias. Kavitha went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for her undergraduate studies and then medical school at the Rutgers-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in NJ. She did her residency at NYP-Weill Cornell Medical Center in Pediatrics.

Lauren Forbes

is a graduate student.

Lauren is a graduate student in the Sloan Kettering-Weill Cornell Pharmacology program. She received her B.S. and M.S. in Microbiology at the University of Rochester where her research was focused on antibiotic drug discovery. Her current research interests include cancer therapeutics and drug design.

Michael Ortiz

is a clinical fellow.

Mike is a clinical pediatric hematologist & oncologist at MSKCC and Weill Cornell Medical College. Prior to joining the KRG, he studied bioengineering at Cornell University, received his MD from the University of Florida, and completed his pediatrics residency at Children’s National in Washington, DC. Mike’s current research focuses on developing novel therapeutics for relapsed Wilms tumors and SWI/SNF-mutant sarcomas.

Paolo Cifani

is a research fellow.

He graduated from Padua University (Italy) before moving to Lund University (Sweden) to obtain his PhD. His research is mainly focused on applying targeted MS approaches to functional proteomics and on cancer-specific post-translational modifications. He is an AICF fellow.

Zheng Ser

is a graduate student.

Zheng is a graduate student in the Tri-Institutional Program in Chemical Biology. He received his B.A. at Cornell University with a double major in Chemistry and Biology, where his research focused on cancer metabolomics. His current research interests are focused on cancer proteomics. Zheng is supported by a NSS-PhD scholarship from A*STAR, Singapore.

Sumiko Takao

is a research fellow.

Sumiko received her MD and PhD from Kyoto University. She is interested in the biology and therapy of acute myeloid leukemia. Currently, she is modeling refractory childhood leukemias using genetically-engineered mouse models and developing methods for profiling and targeting leukemia stem cells.

John Philip

is a bioinformatics scientist.

John is a BioInformatics Engineer. He received his BS in Chemistry and Political Science from Columbia University. Prior to becoming a KRG operative, John led computational and analytical projects in the Proteomics Core Facility at MSKCC. Currently he is working on computational genomics and proteogenomics of acute myeloid leukemia.

Emily Johnson

is our administrative director.

Maria Gil Mir

is a research fellow.

Maria studied Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Universitat de les Illes Balears in Spain, before obtaining MS degree in Biomedicine from the Universitat de Barcelona. Her PhD thesis at the University of Edinburgh (UK) focused on the MDM2 interactome. Currently, she is interested in tumorigenic DNA transposases.

Shehana Gunasekera

is a research technician.

Shehana received her B.S. from the University of California, Riverside in Biology and M.S. from the New York University, investigating developmental genetics in C. elegans. She is interested in genome editing approaches to define mechanisms and functions of genome remodeling factors.